Meteors

February 15, 2013 | By Monte Morin, This post has been updated, as indicated below.

At a news conference Friday, NASA scientists said the object that exploded over Russia was a “tiny asteroid” that measured roughly 45 feet across, weighed about 10,000 tons and traveled about 40,000 mph. The object vaporized roughly 15 miles above the surface of the Earth, causing a shock wave that triggered the global network of listening devices that was established to detect nuclear test explosions. The force of the explosion measured between 300 and 500 kilotons, equivalent to a modern nuclear bomb, according to Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. “When you hear about injuries, those are undoubtedly due to the events of the shock striking the city and causing walls to collapse and glass to fly, not due to fragments striking the ground,” Cooke said.

February 15, 2013 | By Sergei L. Loiko, This post has been updated. See the note below for details.

MOSCOW -- A meteor streaked over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday morning, producing a blast that injured hundreds, caused minor damage to buildings and temporarily disrupted Internet communication, officials said. Yelena Smirnykh, deputy information chief of the Emergency Situations Ministry said 474 people sought medical assistance after the explosion. "Five of them were hospitalized, most of the injuries being cuts by shattered window glass," she said. [Updated, 7:41 a.m. Feb. 15: Later in the day, Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Puchkov reported to President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks that more than 500 people were injured, with 112 of them -- including 80 children -- requiring hospital care.

It took a rock from space to derail the viral supremacy of the "Harlem Shake," but that's exactly what Friday's Russian meteor has accomplished. According to Visible Measures , a video analytics and advertising firm, videos of the Russian meteor amassed more than 7.7 million views in less than 15 hours. And, of course, people have wasted no time posting videos and memes. A few people tried combining the meteor with the "Harlem Shake. " Most are pretty bad, but one combined the song with a pretty good roundup of meteor videos.

A meteor exploded in the skies above Russia's Urals region, sending a shock wave that shattered windows, hurting about 100 people. The meteor disintegrated above Chelyabinsk at about 7:25 a.m. Moscow time, the Emergencies Ministry's division in the Urals district said today on its website. Burning streaks lit up the sky, caught by drivers on dashboard cameras and posted on YouTube. “A serious meteor fell,” billionaire Sergey Galitskiy, chief executive officer of OAO Magnit, Russia's biggest food retailer by value, said in a post on his Twitter Inc. account.

Video streaming by Ustream The Quadrantid meteor shower will peak early Thursday morning, and if you don't want to face the January cold to enjoy the show, you can watch it right here, thanks to a live broadcast from NASA. Unfortunately, you'll still have to wake up in the early-morning darkness to see the show live. According to Spaceweather.com, the best viewing will probably be from 3 to 5 a.m. PST on Thursday. The Quadrantid is a meteor shower that occurs each January when the Earth passes through debris left from comet 2003 EH1. The bits of rocky debris will enter our atmosphere at 90,000 mph and burn up 50 miles above the Earth's surface, NASA said in a release . The top 10 embarrassing tech flops of 2012 In theory, the show should be pretty spectacular -- the Quadrantid has a maximum rate of about 100 meteors an hour, but the glare from the waning gibbous moon may make the fainter of those meteors hard to see. Sky & Telescope predicts that sky watchers either out in the field, or online, can expect to see about one shooting star a minute. The Quadrantid meteor shower was first seen in 1825 and is named after the constellation of Quadrans Muralis, which is no longer recognized by astronomers.

Earthlings will have a good chance of witnessing shooting stars between sunset Thursday and sunrise Friday, courtesy of the Geminid meteor shower. Dozens of bright objects will streak across the sky each hour between dusk and dawn as the annual Geminid show reaches its peak, according to the editors of StarDate magazine at the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas in Austin. This year's display will not be impeded by light from the moon, since it will set shortly after the sun does.

Got plans Thursday night? Cancel them. You have some sky-watching to do. The Geminid meteor shower is expected to peak late Thursday evening into Friday morning, and you don't want to miss it. Scientists say it is going to be the best meteor shower of the year with as many as 80 meteors per hour or maybe more. And if you're lucky, a second, surprise meteor shower will serve as an opening act for the Geminids. Scientists say we may pass through decades-old debris left behind from the comet Wirtanen, which would add an additional 10 to 30 comets per hour.

Stargazers, get psyched: The Leonid meteor shower is expected to peak late Friday night and continue through the weekend. If you can find a clear, dark spot where the starry night sky is visible, you can expect to see as many as 15 to 20 shooting stars per hour. The Leonid meteor shower takes place each November as the Earth passes through a ring of rocky debris left by the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The number of shooting stars we get to see down here is determined by what part of the comet's orbit we pass through on any given year.

The annual Leonid meteor shower, hotly anticipated by many stargazers, will peak overnight around midnight on the West Coast. During the height of this year's shower, experts expect to see roughly 15 to 20 meteors per hour, though such predictions have been known to be off by quite a bit. And while that number is much lower than in some years - the Leonid, in its prime, involves more than 1,000 meteors per hour - the conditions this year look...

The bright fireball in the sky Wednesday night that surprised Bay Area residents may or may not be part of the Orionid meteor shower that will peak this weekend. Some media reports say it was the beginning of the annual meteor event but Phil Plait on Discover Magazine's blog writes: "A lot of folks are speculating that this is part of the Orionid shower, which peaks this weekend. The direction and timing for the meteor are wrong for that though, so it's certainly not an Orionid.